Shuci Final Reflection

I knew this class was a class to stay in when the definition that a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” was introduced. Right before the beginning of the quarter, I had an enlightening debate with a gamer friend who kept returning to this definition. He argued that games are fundamentally about the will, the choice, of the player in an otherwise unruly and unpredictable world. In that sense, anything that is an expression of choice is a game. Life itself is a game. Every day you wake up and choose to opt in, to live, rather than end your life.

I was in disbelief when I first heard this. I had always thought of games as pastime, as escapism. Surely the pleasure I have in a game world, where I suspend my disbelief and step into another reality, cannot be the same as a life where capitalism slowly extracts every last drop of wonder from me. My experience at Stanford has often been one of exploitation as a working class student and alienation from the very knowledge I am supposedly here to love. The endless stress has sanded down my receptors for joy. I grieve the loss (or perhaps just the long dormancy) of my curiosity. It became harder and harder to wake up in the morning and choose life, harder to believe there was anything waiting for me beyond the next deadline. OAE extensions, work troubles, and chores pile up into an insurmountable mountain of misery. I needed something to crack open the shell that had formed around me, to break through, however briefly, the alienation I felt within this ivory tower.

In this class, I recovered a small but precious part of myself: the part that overcomes unnecessary obstacles, just because. Even though I constantly complained about how long the sketch notes took, I was always secretly delighted by the colorful results. I am incredibly proud of our final project, and collaborating with my lovely Re-cursed team made me feel like a real programmer for the first time outside the bounds of Stanford’s often intensely theoretical and competitive (rather than collaborative) CS classes. For once, I come to board game nights just to play, bicker, and bluff at new people (I played Blood on the Clock Tower during finals despite work piling up). I looked forward to class discussions, especially the ethics discussions, because this is honestly the first CS class I have taken where ethics meant confronting colonialism, patriarchy, and systems of oppression rather than tweaking a few parameters and calling the world fixed.

The units on addiction and feminist play stuck with me as they showed games’ potential to shape agency and ways of imagining the world. The most significant way I grew was learning to play games as a game designer. Even when I played games outside of class, I found myself reaching for my journal, jotting down moments of ingenuity that I wanted to reference in my own work. I felt my curiosity returning to me, alongside the precious, long-lost joy in learning and playing. The challenges were still real: there were still nights when I could not come up with a thesis for a critical play, or afternoons spent debugging a single mechanic that refused to work. But these are obstacles I had chosen to voluntarily overcome, and the schoolwork feels less a chore and more like an invitation to do something fun.

I was also deeply inspired by the games we studied that centered non-Eurocentric histories, traditions, and ways of understanding play. This summer, I plan to continue developing a game idea born from our character design workshop: a Chinese folklore-inspired story about a Chinese girl deity with five braids who saves another girl, each time slaying a monster at the cost of one braid, until she loses all her hair and reveals her true martyr self with a buzzcut, as I do (and my group mate Elline). I attached the sketch I made in class as feature image. This offers a nice level design structure with each braid as well as a feminist narrative I plan to carry forward after this class ends.

As I continue making games, I want to incorporate feminist play that centers the player’s agency. I want players to test the boundaries of a world, solve puzzles, inhabit the emotions of well-written characters, and most importantly, have fun. Not the hollow distraction sold to us by algorithms, but creative and undaunted fun that is increasingly radical in a world deprived of it. It is still difficult for me to believe that life is a choice, an elaborate game, when there have been so many moments where I felt powerless. But this class helped me begin putting the puzzle pieces together and get in control just a tiny bit. And when the picture finally comes together, I imagine it will be so moving that the line between reality and a radically joyful vision of it begins to blur.